Send Her Victorious

In “Outside” when the alien that mimics humans dissolves into its skeletal self under stress, it is the human authority, not the alien Other, who gets the last word this time: ” ‘The inhumanity inside will always give you away. . .However human you are outside’ ” (17).
That is so true for Queen Victoria in “Send Her Victorious,” a story with that puckish, dry Aldiss flair that is very nearly as singular as the wit of Aristophanes. So here’s the thing: Wherein Queen Victoria is the code name for the ultrasuperior alien(s) who created the earth and all that’s in it as the kind of experiment in population explosion humans do with rats. Her grave (gasp) is an empty portal to that alien dimension, and she’s out to get the humans who know the experiment has nearly run its course. The story reaches a crisis, and our hero (code name Florence Nightingale) realizes that “The dreaded Queen Victoria had struck and might be about to strike again”(168). He enters the other dimension, a rat in the lab but not in the cage, the scientist and her subject poised for the punch line: “She grabbed him up between two immense pudgy fingers. She was imperious, regal, she was Queen Victoria. And she was not amused” (190).